Posted on 05/07/2014 4:40:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Nothing there now. Time to terraform and colonize.
Are you sure they didn’t take a closer look?
Very misleading, I would say. What they've been calling Mount Sharp is not the small central peak you see at the center of this comparison, but the entire central area of the crater, ringed by the dark dunes. Curiosity is at the top left, traversing westward along that north side of that thin, straight, dark strip towards the "lower slopes" of Mount Sharp.
The yellow line in the Mt. Everest ( in the blue circle ) comparison is 15 km.
I am an avid student of the Curiosity image gallery, but I can’t locate anything resembling this “pipe” formation in the Mastcam gallery for sol 51 or sol 64. It is hard to look for, though, if you don’t know the scale. They can’t be very severe blowups, though, since the resolution is high, but has it’s limits.
You don’t happen to know any raw image numbers, do you? I looked at the Enterprise Mission website, but it just gives the sol numbers.
Awesome pic!!!
At times, Mars reminds me a great deal of Tattooine.
The object is called the *Glenelg Pump".
Below is the raw JPL photo:
The address for the photo is:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00064/mcam/0064MR0285005000E1_DXXX.jpg#sthash.DylocVqc.dpuf
I have no idea of the scaling or distances involved, I just find it interesting.
OK thanks! I was looking through these and I don’t know how I missed it, as it’s very clear. Notice that it is actually partly obscured by that ledge, so that the left profile is between the lighter ledge and the darker object.
I’m gonna say it’s about 20 ft. away. The mastcam is about 6 ft up, so it gives something like a human eye level view. From my “studies” I have noted that the areas in view are usually smaller than you tend to make them out to be.
Anyway, I’m going to look at it some more. So thanks again.
Look at the rover at the bottom left. Photoshopped color!
The rovers carry a color reference plate to enable NASA to “fix it in post”.
Weird, but how big is it?
Thanks dr_lew. Vulcanologists had everyone convinced that impact craters on the Earth and Moon were actually volcanic in origin. The impact origin of Earth’s craters was proved out in the 1950s, but the alleged volcanic origin of lunar craters persisted until the Apollo surface missions showed that there’s almost nothing *but* impact at work on the lunar surface. Before Apollo the US got a set of flyby photos of Mars (the probe was supposed to go into orbital capture, but they missed) showing the cratered surface, and so the volcanic origin of Martian craters was proposed, rejected, proposed, rejected, and it’s on an uptick. There may have been some secondary vulcanism here, but Mt Sharp is clearly an impact structure, imho.
So does Tunisia. ;’)
That’ll be difficult at best. As a long term project, Mars colonies would have to be under domes, but the domes could be constructed out of asteroidal material and dropped down to the surface (thud!), then the work crews would arrive, burrow under the edge, and install the large airlock(s), then fill the domes with Earthlike atmospheres.
On a side note, I always laugh during “Apollo 13” when the Jim character gets to the “Mount Marilyn” line.
Thanks!
Mars has water locked up as ice, and the erosional features are from transient events, which get their energy from impacts by space debris. (imho)
Clay Deposits Don’t Prove Existence of Ancient Martian Lakes [2012]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2932496/posts
Red planet’s hue due to meteors, not water [2003]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1756678/posts
Its actually working pretty good now aside from the fact that its in the dark for about 40 minutes on and off.
Mt Sharp appears to be constructed of layered sediment. Gale Crater itself is over a billion years old, I believe, and one school of thought has it that the whole crater, even above the rim, was filled with sediment due to water flooding, and this was part of the thinking that made it a landing site of interest, since the sediments could have been submarine for many millions of years according to this idea.
There were doubters, and an alternative theory is that Mt Sharp accumulated in place as a result of Aeolian transport. I think there was a recent study that concluded that the layers “sag” around the edges, in support of the Aeolian hypothesis.
Thank you, Mr. Civilizations.
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